Airtight Willie and Me. Iceberg Slim

      

      OTHER BOOKS BY ICEBERG SLIM:

      Pimp

      Trick Baby

      Mama Black Widow

      Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim

      Long White Con

      First published in the United States of America

       by Holloway House Publishing Co. 1979

      This edition first published in 1997 by Payback Press,

       an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd,

       14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

      This digital edition first published in 2012 by Canongate Books

      Copyright © Robert Beck 1976, 1977, 1979

      British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

      ISBN 0 86241 696 5

       eISBN 978 0 85786 981 4

      Typeset in Minion and Serif Modular by

       Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

       Polmont, Stirlingshire

      www.canongate.tv

      Contents

       Airtight Willie & Me

       To Steal a Superfox

       Lonely Suite

       Satin

       Grandma Randy

       The Reckoning

       This volume is dedicated to time. It gives us memories, fine wine and wrinkles. But the only thing worse than getting old is not getting old. So here’s to time, dear reader, yours and mine. May you have many more wrinkles, a lot of fine wine and memories to last two lifetimes.

Airtight Willie & Me

      Back in the days when bad girls humped good bread into my pockets, con man, Airtight Willie and pimp . . . me . . . lay in a double bunk cell on a tier in Chicago Cook’s County Jail. I was having one bitch kitty of a time tuning out the interracial sewer mouth shucking and jiving and playing the ‘dozens’ from cell to cell on our tier.

      ‘Lee, your mama is a freakish bitch that hasta crap in a ditch ’cause she humped a railroad switch.’

      ‘Hal, your raw ass mammy had bad luck. That drunk bitch got platoon raped in an army truck.’

      Airtight Willie leapt off his bunk screeching and made it a ‘dozens’ roundelay. ‘Dummy up you square ass punks. Both you mutha fuckah’s got mamas so loose and wide they gotta play the zoo to cop elephant woo.’

      I was winding up a stone and a day. I would hit those cold-blooded streets four brights (mornings) hence, Whoreless! I mean I was desperately trying (in the flare of matches they lit across the courtyard) to monitor the shuck and jive of the whores and jaspers (pimpese for lesbians) as they ate each other out and banged their pygmy cocks together.

      I figured by culling the bullshit coming from across the way, I might pick up a dropped name and a line on at least one three-way money tree. Maybe she’d be winding up a bit. Maybe some joker had blown one. Maybe I could fly one a couple of my magnetized copping kites (high voltage letters) when I hit the bricks, and steal a ’ho!

      Slippery Airtight Willie, on the bunk above me had slid into mind reading sure as he was rotten.

      I saw his mongoose face peek down at me as he said in his molasses drawl, ‘Slim, I ain’t complimented nobody, no time before. But I gotta say you ain’t nothing but a foxy dude to stop playing for skunk bitches like them over there and deciding to play the con with me in them streets.’

      I said sleepily, ‘Yeah, Willie . . . A ’ho ain’t worth a thimble of poo-poo.’

      Willie, needing a partner to play the con, had given me a six-week crash course in how to stop and qualify (any money to play for? . . . ever been flim-flammed before?) a mark, put him on the send (he goes to get his money), and how to rip him off with cross-fire dialogue between us.

      I sure needed to play Willie’s game. At least until I got the bread to lay down on a far-out ride (maybe a vintage Rolls, fur-trimmed) B.R. (flash cash) and threads to dazzle and lure whores to within stealing or ‘turn-out’ copping range.

      A match flared in a cell across the way illuminating two broads sixty-nining while a third broad, wearing a crude dildo fashioned from a toilet brush, humped dog-fashion behind one.

      An excited chump, on the tier above us, apparently was baring his stiff problem to the trio. He screamed through the open windows into the unusually warm January night. ‘You long cunt bitches gander this big, black pretty I’m holding and eat your freakish hearts out!’

      A shrill voice broad lopped off his fake balls, ‘Dave Jones, this is Cora Brown. You old snaggle tooth fag. You know I know, that thing you flashing wasn’t nothing in them streets but a handle for dudes to flip you over with.’

      I thought about some of the harrowing disadvantages in playing con. A felony bust if caught. A morgue slab if a cut-throat mark woke up before he was ‘blowed off.’ And most unpleasant of all was the epidemic scuttlebutt that grifters often got bone tired and foot-sore searching for a qualifiable mark.

      Willie validated his monicker, and soft shoed onto my wavelength again. He crooned, ‘Slim, I got a lot of confidence in you. I’m gonna angle my ass off as soon as I get in the wind this morning scoring for transportation and other nit shit we gonna need. Howzit sound, Pal-of-mine?’

      I barely heard him because I was trying to pluck out, from the din across the way, a line on a cafe-au-lait fox. She was fingering into the crimson slash in her jet brush to drool the voyeur chumps upstairs. She was boasting how she’d cut her old man loose during visiting hours that very day.

      I said, ‘It sounds sweet, Willie . . . and sweeter is when we start taking off those big stings! . . .’

      As I fell asleep, I heard a young joker hollering he was a helluva pimp.

      The ball-lopper across the way shrilled, ‘Joe Thomas, bullshit everybody but Cora Brown. I heard you ate everything except the nails in Little Bit’s shoes all night last summer. At the time, she told me, she was holding enough bread to burn up a herd of wet cattle. She gave you a buck for grits and greens. No playing chump! Dummy up!’

      The icy morning of my release, my teeth chattered in the sleazy thin benny belonging to some sleight of hand bastard in property. He had switched me out of my sable-trimmed, leather-whore catcher. I was a hundred yards down California Ave. when the sudden blast of a horn behind me almost tinkled me. I got in the snow dappled heap. Willie grinned and passed me a half-full, half-pint of gin.

      He said, ‘Kill it.’

      He looked me up and down.

      He said, ‘We gotta go and score for decent bennys and bread to make up a playing boodle.’

      He briefed me how, on the way to a medium-size department store on State Street. We went in through different entrances. I dug Willie in position to score. My arm swept perfume bottles off a counter with a great clatter as I collapsed myself to the stone floor. I performed an attention grabbing, flop tongued epileptic seizure that sucked men’s wear empty of personnel.

      Some compassionate soul rammed a metal glasses case into my mouth. I peeked through the forest of legs at Willie. He had liberated two bennys off hangers and was nonchalantly till tapping (rifling a cash register) men’s wear bread. He blurred through a side door. I recovered, mouthing baroque gratitude. I walked my eyes heavenward. I profusely thanked J.C. and the mob surrounding me (as per Willie’s instructions) as I oozed away to the sidewalk.

      Our bennys were good fits. But the scratch from the